Do we know of any legitimate ways to exploit the pistol fire rate? I've encountered several people who can fire it at an incredible rate, a rate that I could only muster if using both hands on my mouse, but I'm always hesitant to call them out in text chat because I don't want to be 'that guy'. I'm no rookie at NS2, have nearly 250 hours, and I often use my pistol to mop up a few kills to save reload time, but I've encountered players who can fire that thing like a submachine gun. I've heard of people using Macro keys to assign a behaviour that simulates several mouse clicks and once or twice I've seen the term "pistol scripting" floating around, is there any truth behind these claims or am I just in awe at how fast some players can smack their fire button in combat?

Thanks for the info, I didn't know that macros were in the rules. It's impossible to check for during online matches though.
The only fix is setting a max firing rate agreed upon by the competitive community and/or giving the server owners the ability to limit it themselves and even then.. people would still macro it since, in my experience, rapid clicking for reaching high firing rates can somewhat influence your accuracy sometimes.

To deal with it, we get Carapace. After getting Cara, all the pistol scripting in the world won't save you as the pistol does light damage. If you're trying to pepper off two skulks, it'll actually probably hurt you as there's no way in hell you can track one and do a perfect switch to a target in the .034 seconds between bullets.

Yes it's frowned, but we mostly make fun of people that do it. Do note, we actually can tell when people are pistol scripting and when we are not. There are people in the competitive community who are renown for having stupidly fast pistoling skills (Example: Glissy on nexzil has the 'Glisstol')

That's some pretty impressive play by Glissy. I've watched a few Nexzil games but never quite noticed his standout efficiency with the pistol. Edak is fast as hell too, but I have doubts that he could pull off that speed in combat as he seems to be just firing at nothing in that video. Regardless, that's some impressive speed.

Using something like autohotkey makes it trivial to emulate multiple mouseclicks per frame, thus unloading the pistol in seconds. While there are players who are genuinely skilled at quicktapping the pistol, pistol macros most certainly is a thing.

That (firing via scroll wheel) and straight up scripting (bind mouse1 "fire;fire;fire;fire;fire" or something to the effect) were patched out of NS1 at some point; they added enforced delays of how quickly guns could fire to fix the fact that it was possible to transform guns into railguns with bindings or scripts. I hadn't even thought to try it in NS2.

There are macros, and key bindings, and I've seen it a lot. So it's definitely out there, and you're not crazy. Whether UWE plans to change the code to limit the fire rate server-side remains to be seen.

I think this is moot since most gaming mice will allow you to program a quickfire key. I have one, I've set it to output "mouse1" continuously every millisecond while the button is held down.

Why is this interesting? Well, because it doesn't work. The game won't let the pistol fire that fast, so unless someone has hacked the game this shouldn't be a problem (or at least as much of a problem as it was in ns1).

edit: I lied! I am full of lies. You can fire pretty quickly, takes about a second to empty the clip so not crazy stupid fast but pretty fast.

FWIW I can click and fire the pistol fast as shit. emptying it in less than 2 seconds, I am horribly inaccurate when doing it though because I have to tense the shit out of my hand and lose control over the mouse if i'm following a target. If you see me in a server call me out on it and I'll demonstrate.

From the responses, I'm now 100% convinced that it's the use of Macro keys that is giving some players this ridiculous fire rate. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say the use of some dippy-bird style button would make someone a better player aha. I suppose there's nothing wrong with it really, but it does seem like a bit of a crutch to me.